The strange world of Etruscan
art, culture,
language, and religion.

--blissed-out on wine, banquets, exquisite gold jewelry for men and for
women, Greek vases, and tiny
figurines.

--were addicted to brutal, ferocious sports and burial rites.

--cooked up arcane rules for divining the will of the gods.

A culture of extremes, even by the standards of the ancient
world.

Etruscan
Culture:
Antiquity for Beginners

Diving into Etruscan history
is easy, since so little is known about them. We
cannot locate the grave of even a single Etruscan king.

No narrative writings by Etruscans have survived. No histories,
biographies, tell-alls, literature. No poems or racy stories, no
epic adventures. No Homer graced their culture. The Romans eventually
broke away from Greek authors and literature and developed their
own--Horace, for example-- but not the Etruscans. Only inscriptions. The
Etruscan language is truly
a dead language, though not entirely indecipherable.

But if written evidence is puny, the visuals for their culture are not.

The Etruscans were the finest goldsmiths of the
ancient world. Brilliant, intricate designs, carried out by techniques
we still cannot replicate.

Most Etruscan art and artifacts are connected with religion--funerals or
rituals. We modern viewers are subjected to endless numbers of
funerary urns, sarcophagi, tombs and their objects, and the like. The
Etruscans were an unusually "religious" culture, with little separation
between sacred and secular.

Etruscan Art

Patrons favored expressive, figurative art that looked "natural." To
this naturalism, Etruscan artists added a good deal of abstract design.

Even so, specific individuals remain in the
fog. Nobody "famous" is in evidence.

Look closely at our euphoric pair, the "Happy Spouses". This
sculpture
depicts a type, like an angel in a garden, not identifiable people.

An upturned smile, signifying vitality, was often used, though it was not
unique to the Etruscans.

One point the sculpture underlines: Etruscan wives went out in public.
Wives were considered an integral part of their sophisticated
banquets. The Etruscans' cultural counterpart, the Greeks, kept wives at
home and isolated.

Greek art influenced Etruscan artists, and Etruscans collected Greek
vases by the ton. But soon the Etruscans surpassed the Greeks in
portraiture, jewelry, metalwork, and a sense of motion in their art.

The Etruscan Good Life: Wearable Art

Vases and tomb frescoes depict a culture
of earthy sensuality. Some Etruscan tomb frescoes would earn an "X"
rating in Hollywood.

Both men and women wore gold, gilded and bejeweled bracelets, armbands,
necklaces, and tiaras.
The artisan would heat the gold and affix it by
the technique of "granulation" into patterns on a gold base.
Unfortunately, since no kilns or goldsmith workshops have been found,
modern archeologists cannot entirely recover these Etruscan techniques.

Women wore earrings and rare and
costly amber, imported from the Baltic Sea communities. The amber was perhaps a
fertility symbol.

Men and women of the wealthy upper classes dressed alike: both donned a long
tebanna, precursor to the Roman toga, and mantles,
with shoes curved upward in points at the toes.

Addiction
to Violence

In addition to
finding joy in extreme luxury, the Etruscans also found it in extreme violence.

Etruscan funeral rites sometimes included human sacrifice of the owners'
slaves. Some slaves had to engage in ritualistic battle
until death. These
may have been the first "gladiators"of the ancient
world.

Etruscan chariot racing drew a ban from the Greek Olympics.The Etruscan charioteer, unlike the Greek,
was sometimes strapped to his chariot with strong leather belts, with
the reins tied behind his back. The chariot became a virtual
prison for the driver. Racecourses had steep dips, bumpy hills, and
hair-raising
curves; fatal accidents were numerous, and probably expected.

What is it? The Etruscans borrowed the Greek alphabet to
write down their own language but the results look like scratches in the
sand.

What was this language? Mostly we know what it is
not: not Indo-European like Greek or Latin, nor related to Basque,
Hungarian, Finnish, or other orphan languages. Without an
understanding of their language, Etruscan culture is more opaque to us
than are other long-ago cultures.

10,000 or so inscriptions have been found in tombs. The "words" or
scratches read right to left, sometimes left to right; sometimes there are no spaces between the
words.

Only a few hundred complete words have been recovered.
Only a few "texts" contain more than 30 lines.

The "Mummy of Zagreb"
linen shroud has the most. It's currently in the National Museum
of Archeology in Zagreb, Croatia. The shroud was
originally a codex book, made of linen. At some point in time, the
folded book was cut into strips to use as a shroud for an Eqyptian
female mummy. Her name was Nesi-Hensu, wife of a
"divine tailor" from Thebes, Paher-Hensu.

The Etruscan letters were written in black ink, and the columns were
makred with a thin line of red ink.

How did an Eqyptian mummy enshrouded in one of the few recorded Etruscan
documents end up in Zagreb, Croatia? In 1848, many Europeans revolted
against the oppressive and authoritarian regimes of their day, much like
the American colonists had done a mere 75 years earlier. But these
Europeans lost, and one of them, a Croatian nobleman named Mihael Barich,
escaped to Eqypt. There he bought the mummy to add to his collection in
Vienna. He gave the mummy to the National Museum of Zagreb in 1859. When
his bequest arrived, other items had been added, including jewellry and
the mummified head of a cat.

Scholars at first thought the writings on the linen were Eqyptian; it
took thirty years to decide they were Etruscan, not Eqyptian.

The Etruscan linen book was restored in the 1980's. It survived the
Balkan Wars of the 1990's and today has a dedicated room in the National
Archeological Museum, Zagreb, Croatia.

A folded linen codex book on an Etruscan sarcophagus.
Rome, the Vatican Museums.(1) The Zagreb mummy:
the
Eqyptian female, Nesi-Hensu.

(2) The Etruscan linen book
unfolded (section).(3)
Close-up of the Etruscan letters on the linen above.(4) Transcription of Etruscan letters above by hand.
.(4)
Transcription into modern type. From here, scholars are trying to
re-establish the Etruscan language.

Etruscan Religious
Beliefs

Like their art, Etruscan religion was not
personal. Religious inscriptions were rites for avoiding calamity, not a guide for individual spiritual
growth.

Tinia

The god Tinia was the
Etruscan equivalent to Roman Jupiter and Greek Zeus.Although Tinia was the
"supreme" God, to the Etruscans a
personal relationship between an individual and "a supreme God" did not follow.

Etruscan religion was
deterministic. All you could do was find your place in the
pre-determined order of things, by interpreting various signs.

Designating a god as "supreme" did not mean"exclusive." The Etruscans were an impressive number of gods, with some multi-purpose ones
tossed in.

In the Etruscan world, events occurred because they must have a meaning,
though meaning was discovered through the kind of reasoning we would
find puzzling. E.g., clouds collide in order to release lightning

The Etruscans looked upward to find this meaning: life was governed by gods in the skies.
They obsessed over clouds, lightning, thunder, the position of the
stars, and birds flying over.

For important decisions or events, the Etruscan diviner,
called a haruspex if male or nethra if female, would sacrifice
a sheep according to strict rituals. After examining its entrails, the
diviner mapped the surface of its liver to sections of the sky. Perfect
alignment was everything.

Etruscan religious specialists were sought by the Romans for hundreds
of years-- Etruscan religious manuals were still used by the Romans
until the 1st century AD. And in the AD 408, when Rome was under siege
from the Visigoths and its starving inhabitants about to resort to
cannibalism, Etruscan diviners were called in by City officials (and
with the approval of the Christian bishop Innocent I.)

A sketch of a sheep's liver is mapped
against the regions of the sky. The
Bronze was perhaps
a teaching tool used by Etruscan diviners.

The Etruscan Dead

Burial Rites

The Etruscans seem to have believed literally in a "land of the dead,"
a place, a physical location, for the deceased. The Etruscan dead
were not put into cubbyholes nor buried beneath a tomb-like monument.
They had houses.

How did the deceased get to their afterlife houses? Overland by
horse-drawn chariot, accompanied by spirits. Vanth was one, usually an
attractive female figure. Charu was another, her male partner with a
hooked nose and scowling face.

Where exactly was the chariot headed? Toward a tomb in the earth,
either sunken or inside a mound. The tomb door, sometimes painted, became literally the
entrance to the "land of the dead." Vanth was on the right side,
carrying a torch to help the deceased descend into the dark afterlife,
and Charu, carrying a mallet, stationed on the left.

What would the deceased "see" inside the tomb? A
reconstruction of a complete home, with various rooms. On the walls
might be frescoes of scenes banqueting, games, or dancing.
Bucchero (Etruscan shiny black clay pottery resembling the more
precious 'metal' vases) by the ton-- pouring vessels, plates, and
drinking cups. The Etruscans embraced the drinking party of the
ancient world known as "the symposium," and naturally had the
proper plates and vessels for it, even for the dead.

The insides of a few of the tombs at locations such as Tarquinia show
large-scale painting, the best that has survived until the excavation at
Pompeii. Since we have no evidence of how the Etruscans decorated the
insides of their houses, the tomb paintings might be an acceptable
surrogate, at least for the very wealthy.

For those Etruscan
communities that cremated their dead, the remains
would be placed in terracotta urns. The urns were rarely plain-Jane. Articulated arms, jewelry, wigs, even clothing
were part of the urn's form and decoration. On the lid on the urn might
perch a (stylized) portrait of the deceased.

Etruscan Bucchero (black pottery) vessel.
The Getty Villa, Malibu, CA

Burial urn. Some Etruscan communities
cremated their dead.Discovered in Chiusi. Etruscan. Terracotta. New York Met.